SEVEN
CRAWLING BACK TO LIFE
DAY 18: MONDAY, AUGUST 23
Following the excitement of first contact, the men prepared to eat. After days of jokes about juicy steaks, hallucinations of fresh empanada meat pies and visions of a banquet, the miners were ready for a feast. Instead, the initial doses of liquid were deliberately minuscule so as to nurse their bodies back to health. “They sent us tiny little plastic cups with glucose,” said Vega, “like the amount when you give a urine sample at the doctor.”
For skinny guys like Claudio Yañez, seventeen days without food had left him looking like a skeleton wrapped in a tight layer of muscles, his face gaunt.
“We expected food but it was only liquid,” said Claudio Acuña as he described the men’s surprise that for the first forty-eight hours, no solid food would be permitted. The men followed orders, taking their medicines and slowly ingesting the glucose and bottled water at regular intervals.
Sepúlveda lived in a bizarre limbo. His body was still crashing, the effects of starvation worsening. Emotionally he was fragile, a stew of exhilaration from first contact; anticipation of a conversation with his wife, Katty; and sheer wonder that a drill had arrived. Sepúlveda had developed such familiarity with the underground world that “the smell of mud and human skin became agreeable, part of my life.” But contact from above had done nothing to ease the constant humidity. “Our clothes were wet; we walked around in our underwear,” he said. At night the men slept together, side by side, on the ground.
The men readily admitted that they slept huddled and close on the tunnel floor, which brought up questions of sexual activity. The communal sleeping arrangements proved fertile turf for those who doubted that thirty-three men—regardless of their stress and suffering—could live for weeks without sex. Sepúlveda denied rumors of homosexual activity during the seventeen days of solitude, insisting that their energy level was barely sufficient for walking and talking. Sex, he said, was far from their minds.
As operator of the heavy earthmover known as a “scoop,” Sepúlveda needed to activate foot pedals and consequently wore a different type of boot than the typical miner. His boots were thicker, enveloping his feet in constant humidity; this caused a severe case of fungal infection on his feet. Sepúlveda’s chest and back were mottled with tiny red spots. Like a disease, the fungus spread across his body; sometimes the bumps filled with liquid and ruptured, leaving small scars. The 95 percent humidity was perfect for this itchy fungus, which drove him half mad. Dirty water and the constant humidity caused infections inside his mouth as well. Like most of the miners, his breath was rancid. He missed hundreds of little comforts from above, but now his first request was simple: a toothbrush.
DAY 18: ABOVE GROUND
Pedro Gallo prayed his invention would work. After two weeks of tinkering, Gallo, who owned Bellcom, a one-man telecommunications company, had built a tiny telephone that would fit inside the 3.5-inch limitations of la paloma tube. Golborne and other rescue officials had initially ignored the insistent entrepreneur and his “Gallo-phone,” but as one high-tech plan after another failed, Gallo had his opportunity. Minister Golborne was scheduled to speak with the miners, and aides were beginning to imagine the scandal that would erupt if there was not a functioning phone line in place.
After being ignored and having his contraption ridiculed, Gallo was summoned and told to have the phone up and running immediately. He raced to his pickup and pulled out the rustic invention. “They gave me about two hours,” said Gallo. The phone was gently packed inside a paloma and, along with a half mile of fiber-optic cable donated by a Japanese firm, lowered to the anxious men. Gallo hovered over a cheap yellow plastic telephone set on a flimsy table on the mountainside, with presidential aides and engineers clustered close, waiting as, down below, Ariel Ticona and Carlos Bugueño wired the phone to the Japanese cable. Suddenly, Gallo heard voices from deep inside the mine, echoed and transmitted to the surface above. His invention, which had cost less than $10, was now the key element in the ongoing communications with the miners. Gallo was overjoyed.
Less than an hour later, Minister Golborne arrived and picked up the receiver.
“Hello,” said Golborne. “Yes, I hear you!” A rousing cheer and applause erupted from the rescue workers, who quickly quieted to listen in on speakerphone.
A clear and calm voice was heard: “This is shift foreman Luis Urzúa. . . . We are waiting for the rescue.”
“We are starting to drill tunnels and—” Golborne’s words were instantly drowned out by a new round of celebration, this time from the trapped miners. The conversation continued with the miners desperately asking about the fate of Raúl “Guatón” (“Fat Man”) Villegas, who had been driving up the ramp when the collapse hit. “They are all alive, they made it out,” said Golborne, and a chorus of crying and frenetic screams filled the cavern and echoed up to the rescue parties. For weeks, while the world cried for the miners, the miners had suffered for the Fat Man.
The lead psychologist on the rescue mission, Alberto Iturra, listened intently as he stood just behind Golborne throughout the phone call. Dressed in a green reflective vest and safety helmet, his stoic face framed by a trim gray mustache, Iturra neither smiled nor cheered. The medical literature was filled with treatments for claustrophobia and panic attacks and even examples of humans trapped for days in confined spaces. But trapped for months? Iturra knew exactly where to turn. For years he had maintained a network of professional contacts that included a group of esteemed psychologists. Now he would tap that circle. Iturra sent out his own private SOS.
Nursing the miners back from the brink was a delicate task. Starvation had altered the miners’ chemical makeup. In addition to burning fat and consuming muscle for energy, the human body, when deprived of food, develops a chemical hierarchy that prioritizes the lungs, heart and brain above now-secondary functions.
Dr. Mañalich, the double-chinned, effusive minister of health, sent a one-page questionnaire to the buried men. Were the miners dying? No. Were they suffering from starvation and loss of body mass? Clearly. How much weight each man had lost was a mystery. Amid the frenzy to deliver a baseline level of comfort, it would be days before a weighing scale could be lowered down to the men, who would then be hung like fish at market, their feet off the ground as they swung from the scale. As the completed questionnaires were returned, the answers revealed fragments of the lost men’s experience. Mario Sepúlveda’s lost tooth from his climb up the chimney. Victor Segovia’s earaches from the blasting piston effect. Mario “Mocho” Gómez revealing he was having trouble breathing, the dust clogging his already sabotaged lungs.
Preexisting conditions, including José Ojeda’s diabetes, were now a growing concern. In the absence of ultraviolet light, infections and bacteria could spread through the group in days—if not hours. An emergency vaccination plan was developed to protect the men against diphtheria and pneumonia. An infected tooth could kill. Dr. Mañalich began to research medical history. “We began to look at the old medical textbooks,” said Mañalich. “How did doctors treat internal infections like appendicitis before the age of modern surgery?”
Dr. Jorge Díaz, medical director for the Asociación Chilena de Seguridad (ACHS), the insurance company that covered worker accidents at the San José mine, said, “We had hoped they would be alive, but we thought there could be serious injuries and some dead. . . . I knew the miners were tough. So it seemed certain that some had survived.” As a specialist in high-altitude injuries and workplace accidents, Díaz was accustomed to logistical challenges. Now Díaz faced the challenge of his career: instead of high altitude, he had to implement a medical protocol for the deeply entombed. Fortunately, Díaz had spent thirty-two years serving miners. He knew the slang, the traditions and the rough world Los 33 inhabited.
The miners were in delicate health. They had lost an average of twenty pounds each, surviving off contaminated water and almost no food. The medical te
am refused to send the men a solid meal, since a full serving could actually kill them. Known as “re-feeding syndrome,” the introduction of a large meal, rich in carbohydrates, to a starved person can induce a chemical chain reaction that drains essential mineral supplies from the heart, leading to cardiac arrest and instant death.
Instead the men were hydrated. Fortt’s paloma was packed with bottled water and lowered by cable. The first delivery took over an hour. But when the orange PVC tube was hauled up, it was empty—the system worked. La paloma was now the life support system for thirty-three men. Anything that was to be delivered had to fit the minuscule dimension of 3.5 inches. Mañalich formed a circle with his hands the size of a lemon and said, “A whole world reduced to this size.”
As media reports flooded the airwaves and the Internet with details of the shockingly good news, the world discovered both Chile and the Chilean miners. A new vocabulary was introduced, including the word paloma and the phrase “Los 33.”
The impression most people had of Chile was either 1970s Pinochet-era human rights abuses or a more modern yet equally superficial association as a producer of tasty—and inexpensive—wine.
Now, the eyes of the world shifted to this previously obscure corner of northern Chile. Plane flights and hotel rooms sold out. The rental price for a motor home—a favorite on-site sleeping quarters for foreign TV crews—soared 300 percent. English translators throughout the region were booked solid. Hundreds of reporters rushed to the scene for a rare moment when the lens of the world focused on a story with neither blood nor violence.
The Chileans had first found the men at a depth twice the height of the Eiffel Tower. Now they had a second Mission Impossible: to keep the men alive for another four months, until Christmas, the time it was expected to take to dig the men out.
At his office in Berlin, Pennsylvania, Brandon Fisher watched the TV screen in amazement. The bearded thirty-eight-year-old couldn’t believe what he was hearing: three to four months? As president of Center Rock Inc., Fisher oversees the design, manufacture and delivery of drill systems that cost up to $1 million. Fisher didn’t think it was necessary to drill through the rock. His company specialized in manufacturing pneumatic hammers that smash rock twenty times a second, effectively pounding the rock to pieces.
In 2002, Fisher participated in a rescue at the Quecreek mine, a Pennsylvania coal mine where nine miners were trapped for seventy-eight hours when 50 million gallons of water flooded in. The rising water threatened to drown the trapped men. Fisher participated in the drilling operation that saved the miners as water lapped ever higher in the flooded tunnels. Now he flashed back to the Quecreek operation. Mine collapse. Trapped men. Emergency drill operation. Fisher instantly saw a role for Center Rock. Fisher wanted to volunteer. He began looking for flights to Chile.
Late that same afternoon, a millionaire drove into Camp Hope at the wheel of his gleaming yellow Hummer. With his tailored Ermenegildo Zegna suit, cuff links and rolls of bleached-blond curls bouncing to his shoulders, Leonardo Farkas was unmistakable. To Chileans, the forty-three-year-old mine owner was an exemplary businessman; he’d never have let such an accident occur in one of his mines. Farkas’s mining companies Santa Fe and Santa Barbara are open-pit iron mines widely recognized as operations that prioritize worker safety, fair wages and profit-sharing plans. A job with Farkas was a guarantee of top living and retirement benefits. “You have to wait for someone to die to work there,” joked Mauricio, a taxi driver in Copiapó who applied in vain for one of the two thousand employment slots with Farkas’s mining operation. “It is like a big family; everyone wants to work there.”
Farkas is a legend in Chile for his spontaneous charity, ranging from million-dollar donations to the Teletón, a Chilean fundraiser for disabled people, to the afternoon he walked by a swimming pool filled with university students and offered a reward to the fastest swimmer in the pool. The first one across the pool would receive a check for one million Chilean pesos—the equivalent of $2,000. Sports are an important part of education, said Farkas, who minutes later wrote a check payable to Eduardo Hales, the astonished winner. Restaurant waiters who served Farkas were often rewarded with tips in the thousands of dollars.
Stepping from his Hummer, flashing his curls and gleaming white teeth, Farkas looked like a lounge singer from Las Vegas teleported to the wrong desert. Farkas began to hand out plain white envelopes, one to each family. Inside was a check for 5 million Chilean pesos—roughly $10,000.
“From the first day, my company has cooperated here,” said Farkas in a brief statement in which he hinted at but did not explicitly mention the boxes of sandwiches his company had regularly delivered to the rescue team. “We bought parkas and hats for this cold weather. Not all our contributions are public or told to the press.” Farkas then announced a campaign to raise $1 million for each miner—a call for businessmen and citizens alike to “reach into their pocket” to assure that the men would never again need to work. “I don’t want that when these guys get out . . . they have economic worries,” said Farkas. “I am not here to offer them work; I am here to offer them something better than work—that every family has a million dollars.” Grateful family members promised to deposit the checks and noted that Farkas had wisely made the checks payable directly to the individual miners, avoiding ugly disputes.
While Fisher and Farkas organized their separate plans to help the trapped miners, Alejandro Bohn, co-owner of the San José mine, incited a new storm of criticism when he gave an interview on August 23 to the Chilean radio station Cooperativa and announced that the company “is tranquil” about the possible legal fallout from the mining accident.
“We never had any forewarning of this kind of catastrophe. The workers were trained and had the security equipment so that they could deal with this kind of event and they would have the necessary protection,” said Bohn, who hinted that the company might stop paying salaries for the thirty-three trapped workers and another three hundred company employees. “We have spoken to the authorities with respect to searching for solutions to continue operating. Unfortunately, for the moment, they—like us—are focused on the rescue of our workers.”
Asked if he planned to apologize in any way to the miners and their families, Bohn hesitated. “It is necessary to be cautious. The investigation must be advanced to see if anything could have been done beforehand.” The mine owner also refused to testify at an upcoming hearing before an investigative committee of the Chilean congress.
Minutes later Minister Golborne led a cavalry-sized attack against Bohn. “I find these statements incredible. I heard them and was really surprised.” Golborne then blamed the owners of the San José mine for failing to install a safety ladder in the ventilation shaft. “We could have avoided this whole drama,” said Golborne, adding that the accident highlighted “a very important lack of attention to security” inside the mine.
Senator Alberto Espina also lashed out at Bohn and accused San Esteban Primera S.A. of “bad management, not fulfilling labor laws, provoking a dramatic situation and, finally, distancing itself and saying we don’t have money to pay the salaries. It is quite incredible.”
“In the very least they could come before the investigative committee and explain what happened,” said Frank Sauerbaum, a congressional representative who said the mine owners have “systematically refused to assume their responsibility.” Sauerbaum also noted that the miners were alive “thanks to the professional and steady work of the government. If the company that owns the mine had been in charge of the rescue operation, this story would have been completely different.”
DAY 20: WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 25
Luis Urzúa was now busier than he had been in weeks. The authorities above were directing all their messages to the shift foreman, a clear strategy to reinforce Urzúa’s much debilitated power. President Piñera called Urzúa to hear firsthand how the men had survived. “How we tried to escape this hell . . . That was a terrifying day,” said Ur
zúa as he described to Piñera how the men fought to escape the initial cave-in. “It felt like the whole mountain fell atop us and we did not know what happened.” Urzúa then pleaded with Piñera: “The thirty-three miners who are here inside the mine, under a sea of rocks, are waiting for all of Chile to get us out of this hell.”
Urzúa agreed to make a video for the government. A camera would be sent down and the men were to film their living conditions and conduct a brief tour of their remarkable world. As the conversation continued, the miners relaxed and the dialogue became more informal. They asked the president to send a special treat for the upcoming bicentennial celebration on September 18: “a glass of wine.”
DAY 21: THURSDAY, AUGUST 26
As the miners prepared to sleep, a nine-minute video was released by the Chilean government, broadcast at prime time on a Friday night in Chile. A window was opening into their underground civilization. It was the miners’ first TV appearance. As the news video zipped around the world, the response was incredible. The world was stunned.
Florencio Ávalos held the camera while Sepúlveda slowly panned inside the tiny cave that was the safety shelter. The crude, irregular rock walls. The rusted oxygen tank. The cracked tub that served as a holding bin for a jug of water. The tattered medicine chest that was no bigger than a knapsack and the medications that had long since passed their shelf life.
Huddled like frightened animals, few of the men looked at the camera. Sepúlveda tried to cheer them up, to stir their group spirit. Few of the miners responded. Pablo Rojas tried to speak but choked up. Other men lay prone on the floor, avoiding the camera. Exhaustion hung heavy in the crowded shelter; tired eyes stared off into nowhere. They looked like antique black-and-white pictures of traumatized soldiers.
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